News Media and the Emotional Public Sphere| Strategic Avoidance and Strategic Use: A Look into Spanish Online Journalists’ Attitudes Toward Emotions in Reporting

Abstract

By taking an exploratory tack and drawing on interviews with journalists from five Spanish online news media, this article investigates journalists’ attitudes toward emotions in reporting. The article shows that journalists in the sample hold two opposing types of attitudes toward emotion: strategic avoidance and strategic use. It examines the extent to which such attitudes shape their views of the place and role of emotions in journalism, their judgments on the news value of emotions, their perceptions of the relationships between emotions and objectivity, their decisions on whether emotions enter (or not) the news production process, and how emotions are represented in their stories. The article contributes to current research on the value of emotionality in journalism by focusing on online journalists and complementing recent studies on journalists’ perception and use of emotions in other media outlets, for instance, newspapers and television.